The Unmarked Margin

There was a box of wax crayons in my childhood home, the kind that smelled of paraffin and potential. They were always organized by shade, a perfect spectrum of possibility that promised to turn the white, terrifying expanse of a blank page into something that looked like a life. But the edges of those pages were always the most honest part. They were the white, untouched borders where no color dared to tread, the silent witness to the frantic scribbling that happened in the center. We spend so much time trying to fill the space, terrified of the void, convinced that if we do not leave a mark, we have not existed. We forget that the paper is the foundation for the pigment. Without the emptiness, the color has nowhere to breathe, nowhere to rest. We are so busy coloring our worlds that we rarely stop to consider the quiet, white margins that hold our chaos together. What if the most important part of the story is the space we left blank on purpose?

Nazmul Shanji has taken this beautiful image titled Let’s Color your World. It captures the quiet anticipation of tools waiting to be used, reminding us that every beginning is just a choice of where to start. Does the color define the page, or does the page define the color?